The Unavoidable Cost of Process

I want to open this post with a quote from something I wrote back in January 2021, when there were high hopes among historically oppressed peoples in the United States who thought that the election victory of Biden and Harris meant that we all could put days of horror and oppression permanently behind us.  The quote is as follows:

...Those who support the supremacy of the world's dominant peoples have created a world in which a select few get to Make Themselves Great by exploiting everyone else. Blessedly, these exploiters have suffered a setback as a result of the beginning of the administration of U.S. President Joe Biden and Vice-President Kamala Harris.  However, it would be a mistake for those who are members of historically oppressed groups in the United States to take the incoming Biden administration as a permanent state of affairs in the United States.  Nor should the incoming administration be regarded as permission for these groups to become lazy or complacent.  As the Good Book says, "Do not trust in princes, in a son of a man in whom there is no salvation."  A world free from the tyranny of the few, a world which is shared equally by all of its peoples - this world will not magically come into being by itself.  We who are among the oppressed must still organize or die.  

I have further argued that this organization must be the kind of deep organizing that produces lasting structures of power by, for, and of the historically oppressed.  Why is this kind of organizing necessary?  And why is hasty short-term mobilization of people inadequate to produce lasting change? To answer that question, I present the following quotes from Gene Sharp's book From Dictatorship to Democracy:

Dictatorships usually exist primarily because of the internal power distribution in the home country. The population and society are too weak to cause the dictatorship serious problems, wealth and power are concentrated in too few hands. Although dictatorships may benefit from or be somewhat weakened by international actions, their continuation is dependent primarily on internal factors. [Emphasis added.]

And, 

It should be remembered that against a dictatorship the objective of the grand strategy is not simply to bring down the dictators but to install a democratic system and make the rise of a new dictatorship impossible. To accomplish these objectives, the chosen means of

struggle will need to contribute to a change in the distribution of effective power in the society. Under the dictatorship the population and civil institutions of the society have been too weak... [Emphasis added.]

When we look at a nation such as the United States, we see how government capture by wealthy people such as Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk and by wealthy corporations such as Target, Walmart, Amazon, Tesla, News Corporation and others has led to a drastic weakening of the power that ordinary people in the United States have over their own lives.  This capture has driven the rapid increase in inequality in the U.S., and is a powerful cause of the capture of the U.S. Federal government by Donald Trump and the Republican Party.  While resistance to the present state of affairs can be expressed through economic noncooperation such as refusals to buy things from the owners of such corporations, a robust resistance movement also requires the oppressed to start building structures of collective self-reliance among themselves to replace the structures built by their oppressors.  To quote from another book, Recovering Nonviolent History, by Maciej Bartkowski,

An important element of the indirect form of resistance described in a number of chapters was the development of an autonomous society with every aspect of self-rule well before a formal independence was achieved.  Often, it took the form of society’s own schooling system, self-managed economic cooperatives, social services organizations, and judicial or quasi- governing institutions. The idea was not to take the fight directly—with the use of collective actions—to a more powerful and brutal adversary but rather to transform the society first and, through that transformation, liberate it from the control of the [oppressor]. This was a stealth resistance more than an open confrontation. Society was seen as a social organism that could grow, defy [the oppressor], and defend itself via its own self-organization, self-attainment, and self-improvement. [Emphasis added.  Words in brackets also added by me.]

To put it quite bluntly, those who are among the historically oppressed are going to have to start building their own collective structures for meeting their own needs.   (Hopefully I can write in more depth on this topic in future posts.) Those structures (also known as organizations) will have to start small, but we must all start somewhere.  Over the long term, moreover, these collectives must become the foundation of a society of equity and equality that can't any longer be dominated by the big, the rich, and the powerful.  This combination of economic and cultural withdrawal from the dominant systems (through such things as frugality and boycotts) along with the creation of parallel structures, collectives, and institutions that are not part of the dominant systems is what eventually erodes the power of unjust dominant systems and causes their collapse.  And this approach works far better than simply engaging in repeated mass protest marches.  Those who think that lots of hasty mobilizations and mass protest marches are all there is to resistance should read the short story 拔苗助长。It's an object lesson on what happens to people who don't understand the proper process which must be followed to make something grow!  Bringing about certain processes involves a certain unavoidable cost, a certain amount of unavoidable effort and time.  In other words, ya gotta pay your dues...